When my 12-year-old said this week that she needed to do some homework, I felt like saying: "Don't bother. Just watch The Kardashians." Like many people, I am quite worried about Kim and Kanye. I didn't say this. I didn't say: "You don't need to learn much – just memorise stuff and spew it out when the time comes." I didn't say: "That poem you love, the one you took into school, will no longer count as a poem because it is in fact a lyric written by Morrissey." I didn't want to tell her about the new "I–levels", graded 1-8, because, as Richard Adams pointed out in this newspaper, the blue people in Avatar use an octal numeral system as they have only four fingers on each hand. This makes as much sense to me as anything the education secretary Michael Gove says.

To be frank, I am fed up with resitting Gove and his reforms, though he has himself resat them several times. It always descends into Gove's champions – Toby Young, UKIP's James "Delingpile" and people who are nothing to do with Gove but who tweet as @toryeducation – attacking me in the style of overexcited 13-year-old boys (eg, the latter's "@suzanne_moore You're rattled cos u know you've committed Hack Fuckup 101, basing article on wrong facts, I double dare u to call DfE").

Actually, I have argued for ages that GCSEs are redundant if the school leaving age is 18, but Gove is a whirling dervish of zealous policies. He is right about certain things. Coursework is fiddled. That's what private schools and tutors do. Whereas I love an exam, cramming at the last minute, forgetting it all the next day. It's the one skill that politicians and journalists share.

Wandering round this week, carrying, of all things, a column – no, not this one, I am not yet reduced to pamphleteering, but a plaster column my friend Deborah gave me – I bumped into several local parents who were either depressed or hysterical. "My son is dyslexic – there is no way he can do exams"; "I am going to take my kid out of school"; "My daughter is just sitting her GCSEs and has been told they are meaningless."

All of this meddling is purportedly about raising standards – but we all know the standards that need raising are basic literacy and numeracy at primary level. This is the appalling failure of our education system. The tinkering of grades at 16 or 18 has little to do with the world of work or actual education.

Bear in mind that most of what you read on the subject of education will be written by those who privately educate their children. There is no denying the massive problems in state schools, but why not let schools reform rather than enforce upon them this top-down antediluvian affair? Do I need my child to study Shakespeare and Austen? Sure, and The Sopranos and Toni Morrison. Why ignore music as a core subject? Do we not see now that the brain connects music to maths and poetry? But theories of learning are not Gove's (nor his fanboys') forte. Cognitive development with both pro- and anti-Piaget arguments appear to be beyond them, along with different kinds of intelligence.

Gove's initiative is all about conforming to a dimly imagined past – just as Harvard is moving away from exams for literature, and as China and India realise that exams alone are not producing the kind of analytical thinking required to cut through information saturation.

Nothing was more puke–making than Gove's rigorous eyelash fluttering this week at the hypocritical Diane Abbott, who endorsed his plans for "rigorous qualifications".

As for what employers need … Well, I am glad that I did Latin, but I can see the different talents that my kids have, despite their dreadful schools and dreadful mother. My eldest's dissertations at BA and MA level involved long and difficult research on sensitive subjects (social cohesion in Leeds just after the 7/7 bombings, then the EDL). None of this research comes from cramming. The ability to write at length, to sustain and structure and pace an argument, is useful in work and in life and in no way predicated on the ability to turn up stoned and pass a biology exam. I speak from experience. I am not proud of this, but I am proud of the work I did at degree level: the combination of essays, exams and dissertation. Why should school be so different?

When I have been to parents' evenings over the past year, I have asked teachers what they will be teaching. They say they will let me know when they are told. Meanwhile, they are trying to raise the morale of those now sitting exams that are apparently "too easy". Gove seeks out his own Falklands/miners' strike confrontation with teachers. As a fundamentalist, he does not value consultations because educational experts are inevitably all Bolsheviks.

So I say to my girl: "Read a book. Read one that you enjoy. Employers will want people who can think as well as memorise facts."

And then I hope. Thinking for oneself. There is no exam in that. That, indeed, is the coursework of life. That, indeed, is why this government wants it stopped.